NOTE: This video was done BEFORE Dave Garage's video went out (it had been out for sponsors for about 12 hours). I decided to kick it out early because I already got a slew of comments about it, plus Dave's quotes Raymond Chen who's post is ... well, it's not the full story.
i was curious about that because i watched daves video a couple days or so. glad you had the quote also and appreciate so much your dive. like and appreciate dave too. my fellow 'nerds' :D
@@iivarimokelainen Dave's Garage removed his video on Pinball, thank you for reminding me to update the Pinned Post (this video had a differe description and title before hand)
@@iivarimokelainen I have no idea. His video basically the same topic as this one, but just ended with "no 64-bit versions", then a section on how you can install it on 32-bit systems. I really don't know why he yanked it though. I tried to reach out went up and later.; no response.
I was one of the original authors of Space Cadet pinball. I don't have direct knowledge of the back story behind why it was removed so I can't add anything there but I want to say that I am very impressed with the thoroughness of your research.
Very cool; one thing you might be able to answer for me, was Microsoft given the code to the final release of Full Tilt Pinball? From what I saw looking at the Pinball beta builds, it *looks* like it was a late beta build; multiball is missing from the NT version, but there is some code hooks relating to it. Also, I wish I was good enough to get Maelstrom unlocked.
Full Tilt shipped some time later so I would expect there would be a time gap of some minor changes and bug fixes between the Microsoft and Maxis versions. It was long ago and the details aren't clear in my memory. If Mike Sandige or Kevin Gliner (my partners at Cinematronics) see this, they may be able to share more information.
There's a short answer and a long answer to your question. Or maybe an off-the-cuff answer and a more accurate answer. Keep in mind I haven't had a chance to watch the video (although I definitely will when I get a chance, now that I'm aware of it). So the off-the-cuff answer is: Microsoft almost certainly had a copy of the full source to 3D Pinball, and not a beta version. What a lot of folks don't realize is that we didn't start building Full Tilt until 3D Pinball (Space Cadet) was within weeks of gold master as part of the Plus Pack. Possibly days: the deadline to include the Maxis name and phone number in the product, after which no further changes would be allowed by Microsoft, drove the pace we closed the Maxis publishing deal to build a 3 table commercial product (which later came to be called Full Tilt). Microsoft had various rights to maintain the product and ship it with future operating systems, and among those were maintenance rights. We were required to deliver code updates if we made any and they cared enough to have them. I don't remember if they ever asked or if we ever provided any. Nevertheless, it's highly unlikely though they (or any publisher from that era) would have allowed a product to ship on hundreds of millions of machines without the ability to fix it themselves in case the original developer was unable to. There's also zero chance they would have allowed a beta of pinball into the Plus Pack. There were some bugs that made it through, of course. We fixed those for the Full Tilt version of Space Cadet that shipped 5 months later. And added a couple features we didn't finish in time for the Plus Pack (multi-ball, for example). I came across the Chen thread long after it was dormant, which is unfortunate. I seem to recall one of his examples of bad pinball code was his inability to track down the collision source. However, I still have the source to Full Tilt and by extension, Space Cadet. Other than a couple bug fixes and minor features, the Space Cadet source should be identical to what we shipped in the Plus Pack. Last time this came up, it took me all of 30 seconds to find "collision.cpp". I'll separately add that Mike Sandige, who led the engineering effort on pinball, is a fantastic engineer - it would have been out of character for him to write anything obtuse. So Chen was probably working from code that was a few steps removed from whatever we delivered to Microsoft. I have two possible theories on why that was the case: 1) Pinball was a 16-bit product. A few years after it shipped an engineer at Microsoft (David Plummer) was tasked with porting it to 32-bit systems so it could run on NT, Win2k, etc. Depending on how limited Plummer's time was or whatever ideas he had about re-writing the code, I'd speculate that Chen was looking at Plummer's port code, or Plummer's port code plus any number of other engineers in between him and when Chen got to it. I don't want to make it sound like Plummer wrote bad code - sometimes the goal is just to get something working and legibility isn't a priority. It's also possible Plummer wasn't working directly from the C++ source to begin with. 2) In order to put the cheat codes in that Microsoft wouldn't allow, we had to obfuscate them pretty heavily. I don't know what Mike did to make that happen, but perhaps it required making otherwise legible code less coherent. Although I doubt he would have made the code so hard to understand that critical areas like the collision algorithm would be hard to locate. And someone did eventually find the cheat codes years later and strip them out (at least the ones that generated our individual game credits and those random quotes). So maybe there's yet another engineer between Plummer and Chen who tackled the project. That's the short answer, eh. I still have the source for Full Tilt somewhere, and the old contract with Microsoft (detailing their specific rights re: source), and a ton of email from that era between our company and Microsoft. I could probably tease out a more accurate answer for you once I have a chance to look at some of that (well, maybe not the email).
@@NCommander Nice work with this video! I also don't know exactly why it was removed, but I tend to agree with your conclusion. I was lead programmer for Space Cadet and Full Tilt. No, we didn't provide Microsoft with Full Tilt Pinball sources or assets. I'm pretty sure I would have been the one to prepare such a delivery, and don't remember doing so.
Hey, following up, since I saw the comments left by @Kevin Gliner, and @Mike Sandige, and damn, I didn't think the original authors would see this and I'm like wow. I actually was somewhat skeptical of the claim after I started investigating this since honestly, I found the collision detection code staring at a disassembly, but I also have no reason to dispute Raymond's account; as I said in the video, I just thought there was more to the story. I don't know if there's any way you can me to investigate the original source, although I suspect there is a rights nightmare there, I'd be willing to do a follow-up to this video, digging into the Full Tilt Collection, and a few details that have since come to light. Feel free to reach out to me via email (its on my profile, or michael -at- casadevall dot pro). I actually spent some time looking at the DEC Alpha build which appears to use 32-bit precision, so it's interesting to see what does and does work. From what I can tell, NT was ported sometime before NT 4's final release, and that port was put in the Plus! Place. It will actually run on NT 3.51 "as is", but it lags, as that version of Windows has very slow GDI as compared to both NT 4 and Windows 95. From there, it was ported to Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC, with all those ports working. There was then the Alpha64 port which was never released, and I suspect this was when Pinball broke with the crash bug we saw on XP RTM, which I suspect is a pointer sizing issue in the edge detector. This then got ported to IA64, axed, and well, everything else as I presented it. I found out that someone actually did a full decompile of Space Cadet Pinball from the XP 32-bit version, and he couldn't find any collision issues on 64-bit, but I haven't look in-depth to see what exactly is going on there, but it does suggest that there was more to this story than not.
Space Cadet was a surprisingly good pinball game that still holds up. I have purchased pinball games for multiple consoles and PC over the years and often find myself disappointed when comparing graphics, sound, controls, and performance to that old free pinball game. Most games I have paid money for are not as good as Space Cadet.
@@mikep5854 Trust me, those people will come. Maybe not today, maybe not for five years. But they will eventually come. Until then, we must prepare ourselves.
I've played so much of this game that seeing the ball clipping through the paddle was one of the most painful things I've ever witnessed in a videogame.
They should have at least made a new pinball game for Vista built in house. And subsequently for Windows 8 and 10. It was the funnest game out of the box.
Maxis is the same publisher that made Sim City, right? I doubt MS would be willing to keep paying royalties or Maxis did not want any competition for their game published by them directly (the 3D pinball already mentioned). It would have been nice if Maxis was able to include a native version of Windows pinball in 3D pinball but maybe it is better it is abandonware now.
@@NCommander Just to deepen the rabbit hole, now I'm wondering if it was ever around for Alpha processors. BTW, Intel i860 predates IA64 quite a bit and also was called 64 bit (though I'd say it's fair to call it a 32 bit processor, much like a 386 isn't an 80 bit processor even though its FPU uses that width - turns out i860 has a 64-bit external bus, much like Pentium, but 32-bit integer registers), but it was not used as a PC CPU. Wikipedia indicates Windows NT (prior to gaining that name) started out on i860XR workstations.
@@0LoneTech So, I actually ended up spending a bunch looking at the alpha version over Discord as an impromptu stream: Windows NT on Alpha treats it as a 32-bit platform (pointers are 32-bit), although there are a few ways to get above the 4 GiB limit, no process can use more than 4 GiB of memory. Pinball itself appears to use 32-bit floating point operations on DEC Alpha, and works fine, although I'm not very good with Alpha assembly, and the tools I had were even worse than Itanium. I don't know enough about i860 to comment if it's really a 64-bit architecture; people say 80286 was a 32-bit architecture, but its realistically a 24-bit one, so all things differ.
the idea of pinball being removed because of its outdated aesthetics makes so much more sense now that i think about it, can't believe i never thought of that before
Outstanding video. It's fascinating how deep this rabbit hole goes. When I was making the XP x64 video I was pretty surprised to see a working 64-bit version of game, having read Raymond's blog post before. So I began to think he was referring to the Itanium releases of XP. And well..... I won't spoil the rest for those who haven't watched the full video yet. The conclusion you came to sounds like the most plausible reason to me. As a side note, the development story behind Pinball is super interesting as well. I made a video a few years back going over it. TL;DR: Cinematronics (the developers) proposed the game to Microsoft without having even started work on it yet after their idea to develop a Windows 95 port of Doom fell through. Yeah... that Doom. They only had 9 months to develop Pinball to get it done in time for the release of Windows 95, and as you can imagine the programmers were quite overworked during that time. This explains what Raymond said in his blog post about the code being uncommented and hard for the Microsoft developers to understand. According to one of the employees of Cinematronics, the agreement they signed with Microsoft allowed the game to be bundled with Windows or Microsoft Plus! They chose to bundle it with Plus! 95 originally, but then included it with the OS itself for later Windows releases. A lot of people miscredit Maxis as the company who came to the agreement with Microsoft (and this can be attributed to the about screen making no mention of Cinematronics), but from my understanding the deal was already done long before Maxis came into the picture. Although they did publish Full Tilt Pinball (the "full" version of the game as you mentioned), and eventually bought out Cinematronics entirely and renamed it Maxis South. Anyways, it's great to finally have some more insight on the whole 64-bit situation. Thanks for dedicating so much time to this!
I actually did watch your video on Full Tilt Pinball ages ago, but I forgot most of the details between then and now. I had intended to go more in detail about that aspect of Pinball's history (you can infact find a lot of stuff from Full Tilt in the disassembly; i.e., pinball.exe tries to see if there's other tables to load, and there are remanants of a table select screen and more. There's even a few bits of code left from multiball, which was removed from the Windows version), but time I went that far in, well, the video was already 25 minutes in length, and grew a bit longer as I edit it, so yeah ...
I didn't know about raymond chens post or any of this until way later. However I was really into trying new versions of windows and doing all sorts of crazy things back in the day when I had more time and multiple computers. I ran windows xp 64 bit for close to two years as my main OS on my main computer. I wanted to test out the power of my new athlon 64. It was underwhelming as I knew it would be and most of my software was 32 bit still. I made sure to run half life 2 64 bit. Basically I didn't notice much difference, except having to copy some dll's over from 32 bit windows xp to make things like bink video work, which I had to do in server 2003. I ran any and all systems, even ran windows server 2003 and all the longhorn builds. Now I can just have a stable system and vmware to test things, or use an old laptop. Anyway. I recall running windows 64 bit and playing pinball on it. I had no idea what code base it was, I just remember finding it odd seeing a 64 bit edition was never ported later on, but vividly remember playing a lot of pinball back in the day.
9 months seems like plenty of time to develop a simple game. I know developing things back then wasn't as easy as now, but even so, it would be feasible to rush in 1-2 months, for a single coder, and single artist. 9 months would be easy mode. You have small individuals, or small teams whipping out decent games for gamejams these days in 24-72 hours. Given lesser tools available at the time, 9 months should still be plenty.
Space Cadet Pinball was my childhood. Only reason why is that my parents never bothered getting a new computer, so we had a dinky old pc that ran windows xp.
Same here! I used to play alot of If have nothing else to do at home. Just some random windows game like solitaire because my older bought a PC for himself, eventually I started playing around.
How sad. In 1964 I only had an 8k EMIDEC computer that only ran an entire plastics manufacturing facility, including process modeling, payroll for over 7000 people and managed our entire physical inventory. And it didn't even have a disk drive. Just four 35mm tape drives and an 8k drum for transient memory as the 1k Williams tube memory refresh rate was a bit slow. But even then we could play OXO on the little dot matrix CRT screens, compose music and print graphics on the line printers using overprinting and paper advance instructions. You have no idea what 'old' computers can do. It's all the graphics that suck up the processing capacity these days. Oh, and I've been playing Space Cadet pinball on Win10 64 since I first installed it, I just keep running the Win7 version and it works fine. The speed it performs at is subject to processor speed in that sometimes it defies the laws of physics with the ball speed but just running a few videos in background gets it back down to human playing speed. It would be nice if there were additional board configurations to play on after all these years.
Visual Studio crashed for me the other day, and I got a debug dialog asking if I wanted to attach the Visual Studio debugger to the crashed process. Hahaha
it wasent for Itanium but for Alpha AXP 64bit capable machines Raymond Chen Response "Space Cadet Pinball has a special place in the hearts of many Windows enthusiasts. A customer used their support contract to ask how to change among the three levels of play in Space Cadet Pinball. My proudest achievement of Windows XP was fixing the game so it didn’t consume 100% CPU. People keep asking if it can be brought back. One point of contention is over my claim that I removed Pinball from Windows because I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to work. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander even undertook a Zapruder-level analysis of all of the 64-bit versions of Windows he could find to prove or disprove my story. I was amazed at the level of thoroughness (and the fortitude it required to get those Itanium systems up and running, much less debug them), but there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out, and that’s the one that’s relevant to the story. When the 64-bit Windows project started, there was no Itanium hardware yet. The only way you could run any Itanium code was to run it in a simulator. Booting Windows on an Itanium simulator took forever. Clearly not the development environment you wanted when porting millions of lines of code. On the other hand, the Windows team did have access to a lot of copies of another 64-bit processor: The Alpha AXP. In 1999, Compaq announced that it would no longer support Windows on the Alpha AXP, which left a lot of Windows team members with cumbersome paperweights on their desks. Let’s see what we’ve got here. A lot of Alpha AXP machines sitting around with nothing to do. A bunch of developers who have experience with the Alpha AXP. A 32-bit version of Windows that runs on the Alpha AXP. No Itanium hardware on the immediate horizon. A ticking clock. The Alpha AXP is internally a 64-bit processor. It’s just that 32-bit Windows used only the 32-bit subset. Solution: Port the Alpha AXP version of 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Windows. Now, 64-bit Windows on the Alpha AXP would never ship. But the Alpha AXP did have the advantage of existing in physical form, so the system could finish booting before the heat death of the universe. The assumption is that most of the effort in porting Windows to the Itanium is in the 32-bit to 64-bit transition, and not in dealing with quirks of the specific 64-bit processor you are porting to. The assumption was somewhat validated by experience: The 32-bit Windows code base had been ported to many 32-bit processors, with relatively few architecture-specific issues. Once you got a 64-bit version of Windows working for the Alpha AXP, it should be a comparatively small amount of additional work to port it to Itanium. The hard part was going from 32-bit to 64-bit. The team set to work, and we had 64-bit Windows running on physical Alpha AXP hardware long before we had any physical Itanium hardware. I could test my 64-bit port on a physical Alpha AXP system to validate that it was successful. And that’s the system that had the broken collision detector. NCommander did find a collision detection bug on the Itanium, although that bug was nowhere as severe as the one that existed on the Alpha AXP. My guess is that it had to do with the default rounding mode established by the C runtime library. My theory as to what happened is that some time after I removed Pinball from the product, the C runtime team realized that they had a compatibility bug in the way they set the default rounding mode, and they fixed it. Or maybe there was a compiler bug, and the compiler team fixed that. Whatever the problem was, somebody fixed it, and then they went back and re-tested Pinball with this fix, and everything worked great, so they put Pinball back. I’m just guessing about what happened afterward because nobody informed me that they had gotten Pinball working and added it back. I just assumed that it was gone forever."
Itanium is a very interesting object lesson in how not to implement parallelism in a general purpose processor architecture. I used to be a compiler developer and got the complete documentation on the IA64. Trying to work out optimum code generation for the thing pretty much required modeling separate pipelines for different ALUs, scheduling them based on dependencies, and then merging them into a single stream. What was good on one Itanium might be terrible on another flavor because the timing might be different. There is some of this for any out-of-order multiple issue pipeline superscalar, but not nearly as hard to grasp as the Itanium.
11:12 I sincerely hope you decided to send that error report. And I sincerely hope that when you did, some Microsoft employee ended up scratching their heads as to why is somebody trying to play Space Cadet Pinball on this piece of hardware, on this operating system, that didn't even ship with it.
Really a bummer to get this type of an error - with SIGNED CODE. But it just goes into a bit bucket, lost forever, because they only look at the bugs that produce the most number of crashes, say like Fords Pinto division. Its not like Nightly, where you can report a bug, and have it fix the very next day, ( which has happened to me 3 times). However, if millions of people had crashes like this, then Microsoft would roll over from its ...
I remembered my science teacher having this on his pc in my middle school. He would play this all the time when we were taking quizzes and tests. I felt like this game holds a lot of good memories for everyone who played it and it was unfair Windows took it away.
This insanely detailed research into absolutely nothing on first glance, is why TH-cam is more fun than regular tv. :) Got recommended this vid and now sub'd.
Using minecraft to visually teach computer science theory is pretty damn cool idea. Thanks for that. Floating point was always a math centric abstract thing, but having a visual way of seeing it changes how I internalise it.
The original intent was to use Kerbal Space Program (Danny2462 has a video showing the solar system falling apart with distance which is the same type of bug), but it turns out I needed to use a Win32 build on Windows to make it happen (the Linux version has higher precision), and well, Minecraft is less seizure inducing.
It sure is. I watched a video of someone playing an early build of No Man's Sky and he decided to fly straight at the sun. But the further he flew from the planet, the more glitchy it got until it eventually crashed. Probably due to floating point issues.
I have a warm place in my heart for this game because I held the highest score at my middle school. Just got the ball rested on the left flipper, then released Z and pressed Z again with great timing consistency to go up the 2nd level ramp in a loop. There's a good ~4 vectors the ball can come off the flipper and still make the ramp.
@@bigmikeobama5314 8.1 was decent. I used it in parallel with 10 until very recently. If you ditched some of its systems and did modding here and there, it was pretty stable and lean. Of course, that can be said about every system of MS... if you do their job of optimizing, they all work ok.
when you said "By looking at the installation manifest from other versions of windows , I can determine all files necessary to install pinball by hand" gave me a heart attack and the pain it would take for you to look at manifest. It sucks a lot. You are a goddamn legend
I definitely agree with your theory. Pinball was an old game by Vistas release, and wouldn't have fit with all the other new and revamped games in Vista (remember this was the era of Windows Live games and all that fun stuff)
@@ryuno2097 the assets for those are relatively easy to replace, compared to pinball that has a lot more assets. Also the original devs were pretty much gone by 1997, and Maxis was bought by EA and focused on Sims. I would guess liscencing issues for a remake would have been a problem as well. Possible but not worth the effort.
@@mista414 agreed. They could have just labeled it "classic" to help explain why ugly ancient space cadet pinball is still on the shiny new OS of the future. Hell they could have wrapped a fancy shell GUI on it or something.
Sitting here in 2021, watching YT, and playing Space Cadet Pinball on my Windows XP Media Edition. Been promising myself a new computer for the last ten years or so, s'pect I'll get around to it sooner or later.
Thank you for helping to bring closure on this chapter of my life. I've been anxious and bugged by this for a decade and a half now, and I'm glad somebody worked to bring it to light. This was very well done!
I actually left a lot out, relating to its inclusion in early Windows, and its Full Tilt Pinball incarnation, but I'm really trying to avoid an hour long video ...
First time I saw it was some late betas (they might have been release candidates) that included it as part of the walkthrough to demonstrate how significantly faster 4.0' GDI was compared to 3.51. One of the big changes was moving it to kernel space which made pinball seamless, while it was a slide show on 3.51. The other plus was it rendered print jobs in kernel space speeding up printing. Howei thought that was stupid as I didn't play games on the servers (that is what Workstation is for!) and as much as I feared it meant fonts with scaling errors would now bluescreen the servers instead of just crashing the print que. From what I recall it was a built in font at 2 pts that'd do the job. Not happy about that, we had to set the time a week into the future for it to expire out the job. Obviously this causes issues with Domain Controllers...
@@NCommander On a side note when I noticed that my home computer (which was running vista) didn't have pinball I went to school the next day and copied the game files off their windows xp 2005 pc's onto my thumb drive. And last year I bought full tilt pinball from GOG so I now have 2 working versions of the game. It's been pretty neat comparing the two. Edit: nevermind I'm going crazy I guess, I found an old copy of the full tilt pinball cd that I had purchased back in 2002-2003 ish and installed it. I did purchase some old pinball games off of GOG though.
I guess microsoft just thought it looked too old in general because you can find high resolution versions of the table in Full Tilt Pinball. I have it on my 98SE machine and it goes up to 1024*768. Seeing a high res version for the first time was wild.
Incredible research! I once you mentioned that pinball was working post-reset longhorn, I knew it had to be because of the new games. Ironically I think I made a similar assumption when vista was released. When vista had all new games, I think I assumed somewhere pinball got lost. Mostly because pinball didn’t really fit the windows xp gameset either. It was always an outlier.
Well, I tried very hard to rule out that possibility, but well, that's what I came to the conclusion to in the end. Could be other reasons, but I really don't think it wa sa technical basis.
I remember searching for pinball as soon as we got our PC back from the service center, but it was no where to be found as they had installed Windows 7 after formatting the entire HDD. Before that, our PC was running Windows XP and I always used to play space cadet pinball
Space Pinball: Classic Game, is available for android in the Google Play Store. As far as I can tell, it plays mostly normal. The ball clips through the wall into the lower right ejector sometimes. The graphics and lights have zero graphics issues that I notice.
This is definitely the best video on this channel so far. One rarely sees such a deep investigation of a computer-related mystery. Unfortunately I couldn't watch the follow-up stream, because I had to go to sleep, so I'm going to watch it now :)
Uhm, the ball is supposed to be solid steel (hence the shiny look of the ball), doesn't quite make sense why it would deform visually (in reality, it does deform and return back to normal state, but it's not a visible deformation, because steel is a hard solid material). So even if the collision would be detected, it wouldn't cause the ball change its shape due to deformation. It might be likely the ball was partially hidden behind the paddle (or was supposed to be partially hidden behind the paddle) so the game changed the shape.
@@CZghost Agreed on all counts. It could just be a creative liberty, or a way to prevent the ball from overlapping the paddle layer in a early build. In videogames and movies, reality isn't always what is most entertaining.
According to Wikipedia, there were legal issues first and foremost. A Microsoft employee working at Microsoft Garage got it working on Windows 10, but was told he couldn't release it or the source code unless they were bundled with a new operating system release, so it would have to wait until Windows 11 (this was on 2019)
The thing you need to know about Floating Point mathematics is, it works exactly like resistor colour codes. You have some bits that work like the digit bands and some bits that work like the multiplier bands; and a number is encoded as a stream of known digits within a much bigger space. Adding very small numbers to very large numbers may have no effect if they don't have any bits in common.
0:10 Oh, do I remember that sound. I remember a day in my senior year of high school, in an AP class, when the teacher was nice enough to give us in-class time to work on a lengthy research paper on the school laptops. One of my classmates did not realize that his volume was on full-blast. The teacher was sitting next to me, reviewing my rough draft, when all of the sudden we all heard that obnoxiously loud Pinball start-up sound. Oh man that teacher was pissed off. It was the funniest thing ever.
I remember having an early x64 machine, and noticing that Pinball was getting...janky. Mostly with the graphical glitches, but I seem to remember some audio bugs as well. Adding in it's inability to scale up to hi-res monitors, and it was just getting bad. It doesn't really surprise me that M$ axed it, rather than fix or update it. They have a long history of letting things die on the vine, rather than put in the extra effort.
Definitely. The game certainly harbors tons of nostalgia; it's unclear (at the time) departure only amplified renewed interest. I was quite impressed by such a clean, facile demonstration over what is overwhelming for enthusiasts all the way up to software engineers.
Your hard work, sweaty palms, bloodstained clothes and teary eyes are incredibly appreciated my dude! This was one hell of an entertaining watch for me, and this must be some kind of special nerd power of mine or something, but I'd never imagined I could spend 30 minutes glued to a screen while some random internet bro is talking about Pinball Space Cadet for all of the different versions of Windows XP (AMD64, 32-bit, IN64, etc.) 😁👍 Thanks for making this, this was a truly great watch! And I super mega incredibly enjoyed doing so 🤓🤓
24:24 That's not even a real aero theme. The installer window is made up of static images, including the transparency of the window borders if I remember correctly. Windows PE itself doesn't have any components related to complex window theming, nor does it contain anything related to window transparency, if I remember correctly. dwm.exe is responsible for window effects and is missing in PE. You can confirm this by pressing Shift+F10, and running taskmgr from the resulting command prompt and snooping around on the X:\ ramdisk that it's running from.
I actually didn't know this, but in hindsight, it makes perfect sense. I guess the real story is that Aero on itanium would have been pretty bad :) At least on my zx6000 (although I'm told the iLO VGA which is much more standardized, is even worse in terms of performance)
I want to say Panther was the codename for Windows PE as a whole. I may dig into it, but I more called that out on how bad Aero looked in that color mode. Most IA64 servers, if they had VGA at all, had iLO VGA which was not exactly impressive.
Echoing/agreeing with everything here, you can't move the setup dialog window. The close button also looks... off. Always has. I kinda find it cynically amusing nobody ever fixed it. ("Oh it'll only be seen at setup time," they probably said... while the OS X installer was playing music from across the room...)
@@lillywho Indeed so, and the whole package does the job it needs to do. But since my brain OCDs about details, I do eyetwitch a bit that 9x, 2K and XP all had draggable windows, while Vista didn't. But this reflection also sort of tells me that the revamp process was so disorganized, ad-hoc and scrambled that they had to resort to this sort of thing in order to "get setup done" and move onto the next thing. Which only gives me more respect for the RelEng gold-master process, I guess.
Knowing that it was no longer available on Windows Vista onwards, I made a backup of space cadet when we got rid of our old XP laptop, which I now have mirrored across various drives and online backup services. It works on Windows 10, too, just without sound effects. Interestingly enough, I also have a game I bought from Maxis that came with the full version of Full Tilt pinball (both Space Cadet and some other dragon-themed one). It runs at a much higher resolution than the version XP shipped with. I think part of the appeal of Space Cadet Pinball as an adult is how shrouded in mystery it is; everyone with XP had it and played it, but it was created by a defunct company bought out by Maxis (another defunct company bought out by EA...) and it just mysteriously vanished with Windows Vista. Thanks for doing a deep-dive!
My first experience with this game was when I was a young child. Young enough to not understand that pinball was more than just keeping the ball up, hitting stuff, and blinking lights. Once I found out there was actually missions, promotions and more, my mind was blown and I was hooked.
Any ASM is hard to read if you are not used to it. I, for once, always preferred to debug problems on Itanium, even if they also reproe on other architectures. For starters, the stacked registers (RSE) almost always gave you full access to any variable no mater how many stack frames deep there were at. RSE also makes function calling easier to read, given you always have registers separated into in, local and out registers. Sure, there were some eye-sore parts to it, like the idiotic VLIW bundles which did nothing but liter the code with unneeded NOPs. NATs also made the code far more verbose than needed. But this, again, you get used to filter. Back to the "ease to read" argument, I feel x87 code impenetrable, but lots of folks are completely fine with it. Another example (equally subjective) is that I am very comfortable with A64 (Aarch46) code but I find T32 (Aarch32 Thumb-2) hard to read. It all has to do with how used you are to it.
I remember playing pinball on my grandfather's XP I remember that I could change the size of the window. And I'm fairly certain that I could play in full screen. However it didn't like changing window size when playing. Only after just starting the game. If I went afk mid game and returned an hour later or so, it had real problems changing window size and might crash.
Fun fact: Space Cadet shipping with localized versions of Windows (I can at least confirm for the German version) use a different font for the texts in the two lower boxes on the right. Presumably the original font did not include accented characters and it was easier to completely swap the font instead of adding them.
Ok, that deserves a subscribe. I've worked with developers that wouldn't make that much effort to get their own buggy production code working properly. . . and your theory is plausible and consistent with other choices made for Vista.
The floating point numbers bit with Minecraft caught my attention, now I'm not sure if it still does this but what you described with the collision detection of the crafting table sounds a lot like the early versions of Minecraft Bedrock Edition, if you go out to a certain amount of blocks everything is off center, you clip through the floor if you go even farther. The far lands there are a lot weirder, mostly consisting of rows of blocks that can't be broken.
Most important reason is that it didn't match Vista's Aero UI with the other games developed by Oberon Media. And that game just seemed outdated. Who even bothers shipping an ancient game from 1995 to a more polished OS that doesn't match the OS's UI?
Back when WinXP was the concurrent OS, I had a UI customizer program, and it was filled with wallpapers and themes about "Longhorn", which I had no idea what it was at the time. I just thought it was an inside joke or the group behind that program, and didn't give it much more thought. Well, now I know what that was about... thank you for your incredible efforts, sir!
I just hope it is a decently researched video then - cause there is a lot of misinformation, like claiming the architecture or the products were bad and didn't perform well. (Heck, there is a reason why it was supported for so long despite not being good with the large x86 codebase).
Well, Merced (IA64v1) was rubbish. It's dreadfully slow due to far too little L2/L3 cache, and honestly, McKinley was being outpaced by the Pentium 3/4s of the era. IA64 was mostly supported because HP chose that hill to die on, but by 2004, it was pretty clear that it was a dead end in processor evolution.
I liked that it had a very basic High score manipulation protection scheme. When I was young it helped me understand programming a lot on how small actions can be good deterrence for the people not dedicated to figure out how something works.
I used to play this all the time on the computer. I even have this on a CD backup disc, so I can play anytime. I got insanely good at this. It was one of the most addicting games you could play, without having a CD installed on your computer, or having an internet connection. I downloaded the 64 portable version of this game. In fact, I have a sundry that is full of the old windows games on a single thumb drive. I even got all the Diablo games, Starcraft, civilization, and so on. It was easy Once I figure it out which part of the codeine you needed in order to put it on a flash drive and play it without the disc. I even have a few modded versions of these games as well. I believe the reason why modern window versions don't have pinball, is because they lost their license, and it was intended as a demo. There's a full version of the game, but it's not space cadet. They have a skin you can choose to use that makes it look like space cadet, but it's not space cadet. That's why I have a portable version of the game I can insert on any computer end as long as the components are compatible, the game won't crash or glitch.
MJD led me here, I was just slightly curious initially. I certainly didn't think i would sit through the entire video and be that entertained, it felt like watching a murder documentary (well, technically Pinball was more or less murdered :D) but with content that actually interests me. You got yourself a subscriber.
Great video, I believe that it was decided to be removed when Microsoft decided to go the windows as a service route and they didn't have the rights to sell it as an addon for the MS store since it was a third party developed app. I would definitely buy this classic if it ever gets ported to Pinball FX.
This, Klondike, and Spider Solitaire were my favourite games on there. I remember sinking so many hours when using the PCs at school years before I finally got my first laptop.
@@namedrop721 It was mentioned at the end I believe. The new vista desktop "Aro" theme (since this really happened during longhorn to vista transition) did not play nice with the older image resolution the game would have looked very bad if they updated it to fit the modern OS. That challenge also coupled with image licensing (maybe some other licensing aspects unaware to the general public) made it very much impossible for them to put it in the new releases due to terrible UI. Minesweeper, MS solitaire was licensed by Microsoft so thats easy for them to change the graphics to the new look. You can see it in the end of the video as well.
Not only was this a fascinating deep dive, but to manage to get the original authors to chime in on a thread to add more background context was icing. Excellent video, and one well-earned subscribe! :)
Amazing video and i love how the original devs have also commented on this video, used to play this game a lot on my dad's work computer whenever he took us with him to his workplace, and now seeing all the engineering and all the skill that went to pioneer windows and PCs into what it is nowadays and also people like you who are such experts and educated on the subject of retro computing and older software is something really magical to me, thanks a lot for making this great video!
I read that they got rid of space Cadet pinball because the license for it expired so they didn’t wanna have to pay the company to keep it in modern versions of windows
While having a proper native 64-bit/amd64/x86_64 version would be nice, I've long found that the 32-bit version copied from XP works just fine on 64-bit Win 7, 8.x, and 10, and probably Vista.
The original title of this video was "The REAL Story on Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (ft. Windows on Itanium)", but Dave's Garage (which is a 151k sub channel) dropped a video on Pinball, and I rushed this one out the door to prevent being overshadowed, and made it clear that ther was more to this.
I have not heard of Itanium before; if you can do more videos on that, that would be interesting. Great video though I never saw the appeal of pinball games.
The appeal was (I suppose) experienced by a generation of people who grew up visiting bowling alleys or bars that featured actual physical pinball machines. As one of those people, I can tell you that I found the computer versions wanting when compared to the real thing.
I love hover. Did u have digdug centipede and battlezone too. I did have Windows me as well. The cadet game was there from the beginning but most later versions Vista xp and other versions got rid of the cadet pinball and other games.
Another possible reason: someone had an employee performance metric for removing unnecessary / out of place / old features and Pinball was an easy and highly visible target.
Just for the record, the original author, Cinematronics, gets acquired by Maxis, the division of EA, in 1997, long before the final builds of XP 64 go out. I suspect the 64-bit port of this gets locked up in both technical AND legal (doesn't work and questions around the legal ownership of code and willingness to support it). The end result is a product that is broken technically and ambiguous legally, leaving product managers with the decision to ultimately take the safe route and scrap it right before pressing final GA builds. This would explain why Raymond's article has some merit to it, but also why some builds had it and some didn't. In the end, it dies like Boba Fett -- without much fanfare or thought given to its legacy, despite its rabid fan base.
"What if were to tell you that I had multiple 64-bit versions of Space Cadet Pinball which worked just fine?" I think most of us would ask you for a download link.
I wonder if the DEC Alpha version from NT4 for AXP sorta counts as 64-bit? Since Alpha CPU itself is 64 bit, though NT4 essentially runs a 32-bit userspace and kernel on top of it, albeit with 64-bit registers.
AXP was a 64-bit platform, but NT ran in a 32-bit operating mode and address space. The problem was more related to the FPU as far as I can tell; I don't have an AXP system so I can't easily examine how it does floating point numbers though ...
@@ChartreuseKitsune I can't remember if symbols are located on the NT4 CD, but they are on the CD versions of the Service Packs (I know I found pinball.dbg on one of them). They're not PDB based, so good luck :)
I'm wondering, given the access to disassembly tools and such, if someone might be able to export the original graphics, use an open-source AI upscaling tool to make them larger, and then reassemble the game.
Got over 1m score once at my grandparents house on their desktop that was in their chilly basement, the room was more or less a storage room that had all sorts of ancient relics, some being jarred and pickled vegetables probably older than me at that time, I was probably about 7 years old. Now It's almost 20 years later both my grandparents have passed and life has been crazy. Yet the noises bring that highscore day back like it was yesterday. Thx for the nostalgia !
Saying that there was a bug where the ball clipped through everything isn't necessarily saying it happened 100% of the time. Maybe part of the problem in fixing it was in recreating it reliably. I'm pretty sure it was multiple issues - the graphical corruption, ugly dithering, bugs like that one and lack of Aero, Vista's defining feature, it was likely just decided to not be worth the effort.
Given its inclusion and re-enablement in all the Longhorn builds and XP x64, I honestly suspect no one at Microsoft gave it more than a curiosity glance once the bug was fixed, so I lean much heavier on it getting axed due to Aero.
It's easy to run. I first played it on my Windows 7 a few years ago (since playing it on Windows xp originally) and made sure to put it on my 64 bit Windows 8.1/10 (currently 21H1). I have absolutely no problem running it. I knew the compatibility issue wasn't true because it plays fine on all of my post Windows xp ×64 bit computer's. I even run Microsoft Plus for Windows xp and the other Microsoft Plus program for Windows xp that includes Microsoft Dancer's on my Windows 10. When I first tried to install Microsoft Plus for xp on my Windows 10 I would get the 64 bit error and it wouldn't install because it's a 32 bit app, but it installed one day for some reason. It's been working fine every since.
I am new to your channel. Watched a couple of videos... subscribed. I appreciate the efforts you go to in creating videos and the style of presentation is top drawer. Puts some of the large youtubers on similar topics to shame. I look forward to seeing your channel grow!
One thing I remember when installing old pinball game on windows 7 and windows 10 if you fullscreen the collision bug will show up but if have fullscreen off it wont happen I don't know why that happens basically try play long enough and flippers hitbox fails to detected collision between ball and flipper
What an effort! Absolutely awesome. This is REAL enthusiasm. You must have an unlimited amount of time. Question: Is removing pinball a step of Microsoft's strategy to make Windows more crappy?
I loved this game, in fact, though I was playing offline, no access to inet, I managed to beat the high score on the board by an astronomical chance. I can't quite remember how many digits it was as it was years ago and on my old laptop that bit the dust after a couple of years. I had this crazy logic in gaining multiple balls but increase the amount I could gain if I lost a single one so i could continually play without losing my number of chances. Accurately calculating every bumper hit and ball speed. Now, this happened to me on a IRL pinball table too and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, I racked up a large multiple digit score. Little did I know that I was playing the same game sharing the same table with another person who was eating in the same restaurant. We ended up slowly taking turns out of unknown coincidence, it wasn't until I came to leave, the guy came up and bumped me off saying that this "was his game." I walked away shocked and in disbelief. So rude. He could have said, "hey, thanks for keeping the game going, you're great at pinball, lets take turns till one of us has to leave. It has become our game." Like how did I know that he was playing the game before i arrived cause he wasn't at the machine itself when i was playing it. Sheesh. I was only a kid back then and the guy looked like they were in their early 20's.
![Full Tilt! Pinball - Space Cadet (Fleet Admiral Speedrun - 13:58.1) [Former WR]](/img/n.gif)
NOTE: This video was done BEFORE Dave Garage's video went out (it had been out for sponsors for about 12 hours). I decided to kick it out early because I already got a slew of comments about it, plus Dave's quotes Raymond Chen who's post is ... well, it's not the full story.
i was curious about that because i watched daves video a couple days or so. glad you had the quote also and appreciate so much your dive. like and appreciate dave too. my fellow 'nerds' :D
What video are you guys talking about? Has it been removed?
@@iivarimokelainen Dave's Garage removed his video on Pinball, thank you for reminding me to update the Pinned Post (this video had a differe description and title before hand)
@@NCommander why?
@@iivarimokelainen I have no idea. His video basically the same topic as this one, but just ended with "no 64-bit versions", then a section on how you can install it on 32-bit systems.
I really don't know why he yanked it though. I tried to reach out went up and later.; no response.
I was one of the original authors of Space Cadet pinball. I don't have direct knowledge of the back story behind why it was removed so I can't add anything there but I want to say that I am very impressed with the thoroughness of your research.
Very cool; one thing you might be able to answer for me, was Microsoft given the code to the final release of Full Tilt Pinball? From what I saw looking at the Pinball beta builds, it *looks* like it was a late beta build; multiball is missing from the NT version, but there is some code hooks relating to it.
Also, I wish I was good enough to get Maelstrom unlocked.
Full Tilt shipped some time later so I would expect there would be a time gap of some minor changes and bug fixes between the Microsoft and Maxis versions. It was long ago and the details aren't clear in my memory. If Mike Sandige or Kevin Gliner (my partners at Cinematronics) see this, they may be able to share more information.
There's a short answer and a long answer to your question. Or maybe an off-the-cuff answer and a more accurate answer.
Keep in mind I haven't had a chance to watch the video (although I definitely will when I get a chance, now that I'm aware of it). So the off-the-cuff answer is: Microsoft almost certainly had a copy of the full source to 3D Pinball, and not a beta version. What a lot of folks don't realize is that we didn't start building Full Tilt until 3D Pinball (Space Cadet) was within weeks of gold master as part of the Plus Pack. Possibly days: the deadline to include the Maxis name and phone number in the product, after which no further changes would be allowed by Microsoft, drove the pace we closed the Maxis publishing deal to build a 3 table commercial product (which later came to be called Full Tilt).
Microsoft had various rights to maintain the product and ship it with future operating systems, and among those were maintenance rights. We were required to deliver code updates if we made any and they cared enough to have them. I don't remember if they ever asked or if we ever provided any. Nevertheless, it's highly unlikely though they (or any publisher from that era) would have allowed a product to ship on hundreds of millions of machines without the ability to fix it themselves in case the original developer was unable to.
There's also zero chance they would have allowed a beta of pinball into the Plus Pack.
There were some bugs that made it through, of course. We fixed those for the Full Tilt version of Space Cadet that shipped 5 months later. And added a couple features we didn't finish in time for the Plus Pack (multi-ball, for example).
I came across the Chen thread long after it was dormant, which is unfortunate. I seem to recall one of his examples of bad pinball code was his inability to track down the collision source. However, I still have the source to Full Tilt and by extension, Space Cadet. Other than a couple bug fixes and minor features, the Space Cadet source should be identical to what we shipped in the Plus Pack. Last time this came up, it took me all of 30 seconds to find "collision.cpp". I'll separately add that Mike Sandige, who led the engineering effort on pinball, is a fantastic engineer - it would have been out of character for him to write anything obtuse.
So Chen was probably working from code that was a few steps removed from whatever we delivered to Microsoft. I have two possible theories on why that was the case:
1) Pinball was a 16-bit product. A few years after it shipped an engineer at Microsoft (David Plummer) was tasked with porting it to 32-bit systems so it could run on NT, Win2k, etc. Depending on how limited Plummer's time was or whatever ideas he had about re-writing the code, I'd speculate that Chen was looking at Plummer's port code, or Plummer's port code plus any number of other engineers in between him and when Chen got to it. I don't want to make it sound like Plummer wrote bad code - sometimes the goal is just to get something working and legibility isn't a priority. It's also possible Plummer wasn't working directly from the C++ source to begin with.
2) In order to put the cheat codes in that Microsoft wouldn't allow, we had to obfuscate them pretty heavily. I don't know what Mike did to make that happen, but perhaps it required making otherwise legible code less coherent. Although I doubt he would have made the code so hard to understand that critical areas like the collision algorithm would be hard to locate. And someone did eventually find the cheat codes years later and strip them out (at least the ones that generated our individual game credits and those random quotes). So maybe there's yet another engineer between Plummer and Chen who tackled the project.
That's the short answer, eh. I still have the source for Full Tilt somewhere, and the old contract with Microsoft (detailing their specific rights re: source), and a ton of email from that era between our company and Microsoft. I could probably tease out a more accurate answer for you once I have a chance to look at some of that (well, maybe not the email).
@@NCommander Nice work with this video! I also don't know exactly why it was removed, but I tend to agree with your conclusion. I was lead programmer for Space Cadet and Full Tilt. No, we didn't provide Microsoft with Full Tilt Pinball sources or assets. I'm pretty sure I would have been the one to prepare such a delivery, and don't remember doing so.
Hey, following up, since I saw the comments left by @Kevin Gliner, and @Mike Sandige, and damn, I didn't think the original authors would see this and I'm like wow.
I actually was somewhat skeptical of the claim after I started investigating this since honestly, I found the collision detection code staring at a disassembly, but I also have no reason to dispute Raymond's account; as I said in the video, I just thought there was more to the story.
I don't know if there's any way you can me to investigate the original source, although I suspect there is a rights nightmare there, I'd be willing to do a follow-up to this video, digging into the Full Tilt Collection, and a few details that have since come to light. Feel free to reach out to me via email (its on my profile, or michael -at- casadevall dot pro). I actually spent some time looking at the DEC Alpha build which appears to use 32-bit precision, so it's interesting to see what does and does work.
From what I can tell, NT was ported sometime before NT 4's final release, and that port was put in the Plus! Place. It will actually run on NT 3.51 "as is", but it lags, as that version of Windows has very slow GDI as compared to both NT 4 and Windows 95. From there, it was ported to Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC, with all those ports working. There was then the Alpha64 port which was never released, and I suspect this was when Pinball broke with the crash bug we saw on XP RTM, which I suspect is a pointer sizing issue in the edge detector. This then got ported to IA64, axed, and well, everything else as I presented it.
I found out that someone actually did a full decompile of Space Cadet Pinball from the XP 32-bit version, and he couldn't find any collision issues on 64-bit, but I haven't look in-depth to see what exactly is going on there, but it does suggest that there was more to this story than not.
Space Cadet was a surprisingly good pinball game that still holds up. I have purchased pinball games for multiple consoles and PC over the years and often find myself disappointed when comparing graphics, sound, controls, and performance to that old free pinball game. Most games I have paid money for are not as good as Space Cadet.
Try 3-D Ultra Pinball. Though I have nostalgia glasses for it too.
Pinball fantasies and Microsoft pinball arcade were quite decent. Bally/Amtex 8Ball deluxe was good for low spec dos PC's (286 and up).
Epic Pinball?
Try Full Tilt! Pinball. It’s basically the full version of 3D Pinball Space Cadet but also with more skins
This pinball game was a part of the pack from Maxis, Marble drop. Three pinball games and a puzzle game with balls.
I bet Microsoft never expected anyone to dedicate so much effort into a pre-installed game either
@@pnksounds I hope nobody likes windows candy crush enough to do that….
@@mikep5854 fr 💀
@@pnksounds windows candy crush ??????!!!!!!!!!
So it means that every windows user has turned into a mom 🤯😱😂
@@mikep5854 Trust me, those people will come. Maybe not today, maybe not for five years. But they will eventually come.
Until then, we must prepare ourselves.
@@mikep5854 I don't like any version of Candy Crush. LOL. Not really a fan of puzzle games apart from Tetris to be honest.
I've played so much of this game that seeing the ball clipping through the paddle was one of the most painful things I've ever witnessed in a videogame.
The Itanium was widely known throughout the industry at the time as the "Itanic", because everyone could see that it was sinking beneath the waves.
Sucks that it took SGI down with it.
Ah Itanium, ala Intel still hasn't learned it's x86 lesson, 2001 edition.
That is hilarious!
Need some "Itanic" memes.
This makes me wonder what would have happened if AMD didn't create amd64 but went with Itanium too instead.
They should have at least made a new pinball game for Vista built in house. And subsequently for Windows 8 and 10. It was the funnest game out of the box.
I would go along with that.
I used to play with that game back in the day. I fully agree that they should've upgraded and kept it on Windows 10.
It was a hell of a game. Loved pinball as a kid. I played so much kirbys pinball land on gameboy
Maxis is the same publisher that made Sim City, right? I doubt MS would be willing to keep paying royalties or Maxis did not want any competition for their game published by them directly (the 3D pinball already mentioned). It would have been nice if Maxis was able to include a native version of Windows pinball in 3D pinball but maybe it is better it is abandonware now.
Best software microsoft ever created.
edit: not developed by Microsoft, go figure
Finally something I can talk about on my Date tonight.
How did it go?!
@@crkvend It was awkward because she did already know this story of pinball.exe and the 32bit and 64bit problem, and I had nothing else to say.
@@cinquecento1985 :D
Anyone watching this video is not going on any date.
@@bjejoh the truth hurts
I'm blown away by the level of effort and detail you have gone into here. An amazing piece of work!
One month of solid research, reverse engineering and move for a 30 minute. Someone has lost its mind, and it's probably me :)
@@NCommander full tilt
@@NCommander Just to deepen the rabbit hole, now I'm wondering if it was ever around for Alpha processors. BTW, Intel i860 predates IA64 quite a bit and also was called 64 bit (though I'd say it's fair to call it a 32 bit processor, much like a 386 isn't an 80 bit processor even though its FPU uses that width - turns out i860 has a 64-bit external bus, much like Pentium, but 32-bit integer registers), but it was not used as a PC CPU. Wikipedia indicates Windows NT (prior to gaining that name) started out on i860XR workstations.
@@0LoneTech So, I actually ended up spending a bunch looking at the alpha version over Discord as an impromptu stream:
Windows NT on Alpha treats it as a 32-bit platform (pointers are 32-bit), although there are a few ways to get above the 4 GiB limit, no process can use more than 4 GiB of memory.
Pinball itself appears to use 32-bit floating point operations on DEC Alpha, and works fine, although I'm not very good with Alpha assembly, and the tools I had were even worse than Itanium.
I don't know enough about i860 to comment if it's really a 64-bit architecture; people say 80286 was a 32-bit architecture, but its realistically a 24-bit one, so all things differ.
@@NCommander If we're rating them by address space then 8086 is 20 bit, Pentium Pro 36 bit, and various amd64 models 48 to 52 bit. It gets weird.
This was the only game everyone used to play back in primary school, on the school computers. We were all so serious about our scores 😅. Good times.
Wow I feel old. My primary school games were Oregon Trail and Math Munchers.
Pinball highscores were everything
@@jordanwhite352 Those were the days lol. Also Carmen Sandiego games.
@@jordanwhite352 and odell down under
skifree and missle command
the idea of pinball being removed because of its outdated aesthetics makes so much more sense now that i think about it, can't believe i never thought of that before
Sarcasm?
@@boneappletea3858 question yourself?
@MrRico020 I was asking if the comment was sarcasm. I wasn't making a statement or hinting at anything. Nothing to question myself over.
@@boneappletea3858 ur so clever
Outstanding video. It's fascinating how deep this rabbit hole goes. When I was making the XP x64 video I was pretty surprised to see a working 64-bit version of game, having read Raymond's blog post before. So I began to think he was referring to the Itanium releases of XP. And well..... I won't spoil the rest for those who haven't watched the full video yet. The conclusion you came to sounds like the most plausible reason to me. As a side note, the development story behind Pinball is super interesting as well. I made a video a few years back going over it. TL;DR: Cinematronics (the developers) proposed the game to Microsoft without having even started work on it yet after their idea to develop a Windows 95 port of Doom fell through. Yeah... that Doom. They only had 9 months to develop Pinball to get it done in time for the release of Windows 95, and as you can imagine the programmers were quite overworked during that time. This explains what Raymond said in his blog post about the code being uncommented and hard for the Microsoft developers to understand. According to one of the employees of Cinematronics, the agreement they signed with Microsoft allowed the game to be bundled with Windows or Microsoft Plus! They chose to bundle it with Plus! 95 originally, but then included it with the OS itself for later Windows releases. A lot of people miscredit Maxis as the company who came to the agreement with Microsoft (and this can be attributed to the about screen making no mention of Cinematronics), but from my understanding the deal was already done long before Maxis came into the picture. Although they did publish Full Tilt Pinball (the "full" version of the game as you mentioned), and eventually bought out Cinematronics entirely and renamed it Maxis South. Anyways, it's great to finally have some more insight on the whole 64-bit situation. Thanks for dedicating so much time to this!
I actually did watch your video on Full Tilt Pinball ages ago, but I forgot most of the details between then and now.
I had intended to go more in detail about that aspect of Pinball's history (you can infact find a lot of stuff from Full Tilt in the disassembly; i.e., pinball.exe tries to see if there's other tables to load, and there are remanants of a table select screen and more. There's even a few bits of code left from multiball, which was removed from the Windows version), but time I went that far in, well, the video was already 25 minutes in length, and grew a bit longer as I edit it, so yeah ...
I didn't know about raymond chens post or any of this until way later. However I was really into trying new versions of windows and doing all sorts of crazy things back in the day when I had more time and multiple computers. I ran windows xp 64 bit for close to two years as my main OS on my main computer. I wanted to test out the power of my new athlon 64. It was underwhelming as I knew it would be and most of my software was 32 bit still. I made sure to run half life 2 64 bit. Basically I didn't notice much difference, except having to copy some dll's over from 32 bit windows xp to make things like bink video work, which I had to do in server 2003. I ran any and all systems, even ran windows server 2003 and all the longhorn builds. Now I can just have a stable system and vmware to test things, or use an old laptop.
Anyway. I recall running windows 64 bit and playing pinball on it. I had no idea what code base it was, I just remember finding it odd seeing a 64 bit edition was never ported later on, but vividly remember playing a lot of pinball back in the day.
9 months seems like plenty of time to develop a simple game. I know developing things back then wasn't as easy as now, but even so, it would be feasible to rush in 1-2 months, for a single coder, and single artist. 9 months would be easy mode. You have small individuals, or small teams whipping out decent games for gamejams these days in 24-72 hours. Given lesser tools available at the time, 9 months should still be plenty.
The “too long dont read” is longer than the actual content
He sounds a bit like you actually
Space Cadet Pinball was my childhood. Only reason why is that my parents never bothered getting a new computer, so we had a dinky old pc that ran windows xp.
it was only a Demo, Fury3D too
DX needed to be promoted on Windows!
This channel,mad people only here! stupid levels!
Same here! I used to play alot of If have nothing else to do at home. Just some random windows game like solitaire because my older bought a PC for himself, eventually I started playing around.
Was playing t4c and myst and the sims later on. P4 bb here.
How sad. In 1964 I only had an 8k EMIDEC computer that only ran an entire plastics manufacturing facility, including process modeling, payroll for over 7000 people and managed our entire physical inventory. And it didn't even have a disk drive. Just four 35mm tape drives and an 8k drum for transient memory as the 1k Williams tube memory refresh rate was a bit slow. But even then we could play OXO on the little dot matrix CRT screens, compose music and print graphics on the line printers using overprinting and paper advance instructions.
You have no idea what 'old' computers can do. It's all the graphics that suck up the processing capacity these days. Oh, and I've been playing Space Cadet pinball on Win10 64 since I first installed it, I just keep running the Win7 version and it works fine. The speed it performs at is subject to processor speed in that sometimes it defies the laws of physics with the ball speed but just running a few videos in background gets it back down to human playing speed. It would be nice if there were additional board configurations to play on after all these years.
@@philipgrice1026 ok boomer
You had me in stitches with "It's never a good sign when you need to debug your debugger..." at 12:00-ish!
Having actually had to do that for real. trust me, its a hell you don't wish to inflict on others.
Visual Studio crashed for me the other day, and I got a debug dialog asking if I wanted to attach the Visual Studio debugger to the crashed process. Hahaha
You were supposed to destroy them, not join them!
so THAT'S why this video was recommended to me right after watching ones on Skyrim
Everyone who is a long time user of Windows knows the paid of task manager not responding
it wasent for Itanium but for Alpha AXP 64bit capable machines
Raymond Chen Response
"Space Cadet Pinball has a special place in the hearts of many Windows enthusiasts. A customer used their support contract to ask how to change among the three levels of play in Space Cadet Pinball. My proudest achievement of Windows XP was fixing the game so it didn’t consume 100% CPU. People keep asking if it can be brought back.
One point of contention is over my claim that I removed Pinball from Windows because I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to work. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander even undertook a Zapruder-level analysis of all of the 64-bit versions of Windows he could find to prove or disprove my story.
I was amazed at the level of thoroughness (and the fortitude it required to get those Itanium systems up and running, much less debug them), but there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out, and that’s the one that’s relevant to the story.
When the 64-bit Windows project started, there was no Itanium hardware yet. The only way you could run any Itanium code was to run it in a simulator. Booting Windows on an Itanium simulator took forever. Clearly not the development environment you wanted when porting millions of lines of code.
On the other hand, the Windows team did have access to a lot of copies of another 64-bit processor: The Alpha AXP.
In 1999, Compaq announced that it would no longer support Windows on the Alpha AXP, which left a lot of Windows team members with cumbersome paperweights on their desks.
Let’s see what we’ve got here.
A lot of Alpha AXP machines sitting around with nothing to do.
A bunch of developers who have experience with the Alpha AXP.
A 32-bit version of Windows that runs on the Alpha AXP.
No Itanium hardware on the immediate horizon.
A ticking clock.
The Alpha AXP is internally a 64-bit processor. It’s just that 32-bit Windows used only the 32-bit subset.
Solution: Port the Alpha AXP version of 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Windows.
Now, 64-bit Windows on the Alpha AXP would never ship. But the Alpha AXP did have the advantage of existing in physical form, so the system could finish booting before the heat death of the universe. The assumption is that most of the effort in porting Windows to the Itanium is in the 32-bit to 64-bit transition, and not in dealing with quirks of the specific 64-bit processor you are porting to.
The assumption was somewhat validated by experience: The 32-bit Windows code base had been ported to many 32-bit processors, with relatively few architecture-specific issues. Once you got a 64-bit version of Windows working for the Alpha AXP, it should be a comparatively small amount of additional work to port it to Itanium. The hard part was going from 32-bit to 64-bit.
The team set to work, and we had 64-bit Windows running on physical Alpha AXP hardware long before we had any physical Itanium hardware. I could test my 64-bit port on a physical Alpha AXP system to validate that it was successful. And that’s the system that had the broken collision detector.
NCommander did find a collision detection bug on the Itanium, although that bug was nowhere as severe as the one that existed on the Alpha AXP. My guess is that it had to do with the default rounding mode established by the C runtime library.
My theory as to what happened is that some time after I removed Pinball from the product, the C runtime team realized that they had a compatibility bug in the way they set the default rounding mode, and they fixed it. Or maybe there was a compiler bug, and the compiler team fixed that. Whatever the problem was, somebody fixed it, and then they went back and re-tested Pinball with this fix, and everything worked great, so they put Pinball back.
I’m just guessing about what happened afterward because nobody informed me that they had gotten Pinball working and added it back. I just assumed that it was gone forever."
@@aminesheridi995 This comment should be pinned.
Itanium is a very interesting object lesson in how not to implement parallelism in a general purpose processor architecture. I used to be a compiler developer and got the complete documentation on the IA64. Trying to work out optimum code generation for the thing pretty much required modeling separate pipelines for different ALUs, scheduling them based on dependencies, and then merging them into a single stream. What was good on one Itanium might be terrible on another flavor because the timing might be different. There is some of this for any out-of-order multiple issue pipeline superscalar, but not nearly as hard to grasp as the Itanium.
11:12 I sincerely hope you decided to send that error report. And I sincerely hope that when you did, some Microsoft employee ended up scratching their heads as to why is somebody trying to play Space Cadet Pinball on this piece of hardware, on this operating system, that didn't even ship with it.
I know I'd have sent it, though sadly it would probably have been caught by an AI script that deletes anything no longer supported.
Really a bummer to get this type of an error - with SIGNED CODE.
But it just goes into a bit bucket, lost forever, because they only look at the bugs that produce the most number of crashes, say like Fords Pinto division.
Its not like Nightly, where you can report a bug, and have it fix the very next day, ( which has happened to me 3 times).
However, if millions of people had crashes like this, then Microsoft would roll over from its ...
@@TheAnon03 doesn't have to be "AI" just a script that ignores stuff
@@_GhostMiner Sometimes the correct terminology just doesn't come to your head and you've got to go with what you've got.
@@TheAnon03 it's not about terminology, you said they might use a script, but not an AI for such basic task
I remembered my science teacher having this on his pc in my middle school. He would play this all the time when we were taking quizzes and tests. I felt like this game holds a lot of good memories for everyone who played it and it was unfair Windows took it away.
Ah yes had to kill time before smartphones.
Yes if they didn’t remove it I would of known of it earlier
@@TheCaptainSplatter this was in the early 2010s
Wow bro, what are the chances of me seeing you here hahaha
I mean, hey, we got Purble Place
This insanely detailed research into absolutely nothing on first glance, is why TH-cam is more fun than regular tv. :) Got recommended this vid and now sub'd.
I agree strongly with what you said. The deep dives you can take are so unique.
I love how this story goes from just a pinball story to one that meanders through the Itanium. Nicely done.
This guy works like a detective in 2021 to solve the mystery of an 15 year missing game. Love it
Using minecraft to visually teach computer science theory is pretty damn cool idea. Thanks for that. Floating point was always a math centric abstract thing, but having a visual way of seeing it changes how I internalise it.
The original intent was to use Kerbal Space Program (Danny2462 has a video showing the solar system falling apart with distance which is the same type of bug), but it turns out I needed to use a Win32 build on Windows to make it happen (the Linux version has higher precision), and well, Minecraft is less seizure inducing.
Minecraft is also a Microsoft product - I mean: as Microsoft as Pinball, so very well fitting.
@@sarowie Yeah, but not back then. Mojang were the sole developers back when the beta hadn't implemented double precision floats.
Agreed, made it way easier for non-techos.
It sure is. I watched a video of someone playing an early build of No Man's Sky and he decided to fly straight at the sun. But the further he flew from the planet, the more glitchy it got until it eventually crashed. Probably due to floating point issues.
I played this with my grandfather when I would spend time at his house. RIP gramps miss you.
Sending some love your way. My grandfather died earlier this year. I feel that man. Yo take care.
💝💝
He def sees this message.
All dead read TH-cam comments.
@@Mark-zi6nt , , and the Living Dead too , apparently ⚰️ R I P
I have a warm place in my heart for this game because I held the highest score at my middle school. Just got the ball rested on the left flipper, then released Z and pressed Z again with great timing consistency to go up the 2nd level ramp in a loop. There's a good ~4 vectors the ball can come off the flipper and still make the ramp.
But doing this you couldn’t still accomplish tasks and get promoted and stuff though…that was half the fun
So the conspiracy behind pinball being taken away was because it didn’t look good on VISTA? Man, Vista truly was the worst operating system.
8 was even worse. however in the grand scope of OS, windows has always been the worst.
@@bigmikeobama5314 8.1 was decent. I used it in parallel with 10 until very recently. If you ditched some of its systems and did modding here and there, it was pretty stable and lean. Of course, that can be said about every system of MS... if you do their job of optimizing, they all work ok.
when you said "By looking at the installation manifest from other versions of windows , I can determine all files necessary to install pinball by hand"
gave me a heart attack and the pain it would take for you to look at manifest. It sucks a lot. You are a goddamn legend
Manifest is easy comparing to Windbg which sucks 1000x more...
I'm glad someone's out there working on the big questions.
I definitely agree with your theory. Pinball was an old game by Vistas release, and wouldn't have fit with all the other new and revamped games in Vista (remember this was the era of Windows Live games and all that fun stuff)
I don't know why Microsoft wont revamp Pinball then. They revamped Solitaire and other card games too.
@@ryuno2097 likely the old spaghetti code is a pain to work on, so they gave up.
@@ryuno2097 the assets for those are relatively easy to replace, compared to pinball that has a lot more assets. Also the original devs were pretty much gone by 1997, and Maxis was bought by EA and focused on Sims. I would guess liscencing issues for a remake would have been a problem as well. Possible but not worth the effort.
It definitely makes sense. Still, I wish they'd have just kept it as a hidden Easter egg or something, since they had a working version of it.
@@mista414 agreed. They could have just labeled it "classic" to help explain why ugly ancient space cadet pinball is still on the shiny new OS of the future.
Hell they could have wrapped a fancy shell GUI on it or something.
I forgot all about this game! I used to play it for hours on my desktop! 😁
Yea man it was addictive as hell!
@@meganwyatt1607 yep! haha
same, my grandpa had a windows 98 laptop and I played this for hours
Sitting here in 2021, watching YT, and playing Space Cadet Pinball on my Windows XP Media Edition.
Been promising myself a new computer for the last ten years or so, s'pect I'll get around to it sooner or later.
I still remember the code to control the pinball with the mouse
Thank you for helping to bring closure on this chapter of my life. I've been anxious and bugged by this for a decade and a half now, and I'm glad somebody worked to bring it to light. This was very well done!
Honestly I didn't know a lot about Pinball's history until now. Didn't realize or even cross my mind it might have IA64 builds. That's crazy.
I actually left a lot out, relating to its inclusion in early Windows, and its Full Tilt Pinball incarnation, but I'm really trying to avoid an hour long video ...
First time I saw it was some late betas (they might have been release candidates) that included it as part of the walkthrough to demonstrate how significantly faster 4.0' GDI was compared to 3.51. One of the big changes was moving it to kernel space which made pinball seamless, while it was a slide show on 3.51. The other plus was it rendered print jobs in kernel space speeding up printing.
Howei thought that was stupid as I didn't play games on the servers (that is what Workstation is for!) and as much as I feared it meant fonts with scaling errors would now bluescreen the servers instead of just crashing the print que. From what I recall it was a built in font at 2 pts that'd do the job. Not happy about that, we had to set the time a week into the future for it to expire out the job. Obviously this causes issues with Domain Controllers...
@@NCommander On a side note when I noticed that my home computer (which was running vista) didn't have pinball I went to school the next day and copied the game files off their windows xp 2005 pc's onto my thumb drive. And last year I bought full tilt pinball from GOG so I now have 2 working versions of the game. It's been pretty neat comparing the two. Edit: nevermind I'm going crazy I guess, I found an old copy of the full tilt pinball cd that I had purchased back in 2002-2003 ish and installed it. I did purchase some old pinball games off of GOG though.
@@NCommander please do hour long videos! Your explanation is sooo good and detailed, i love it. Also, we all nerds here :)
I guess microsoft just thought it looked too old in general because you can find high resolution versions of the table in Full Tilt Pinball. I have it on my 98SE machine and it goes up to 1024*768. Seeing a high res version for the first time was wild.
Incredible research! I once you mentioned that pinball was working post-reset longhorn, I knew it had to be because of the new games.
Ironically I think I made a similar assumption when vista was released. When vista had all new games, I think I assumed somewhere pinball got lost. Mostly because pinball didn’t really fit the windows xp gameset either. It was always an outlier.
Well, I tried very hard to rule out that possibility, but well, that's what I came to the conclusion to in the end. Could be other reasons, but I really don't think it wa sa technical basis.
I remember searching for pinball as soon as we got our PC back from the service center, but it was no where to be found as they had installed Windows 7 after formatting the entire HDD. Before that, our PC was running Windows XP and I always used to play space cadet pinball
Feels bad man.
Space Pinball: Classic Game, is available for android in the Google Play Store. As far as I can tell, it plays mostly normal. The ball clips through the wall into the lower right ejector sometimes. The graphics and lights have zero graphics issues that I notice.
This is definitely the best video on this channel so far. One rarely sees such a deep investigation of a computer-related mystery. Unfortunately I couldn't watch the follow-up stream, because I had to go to sleep, so I'm going to watch it now :)
The ball deforms when it passes through the paddle, so the collision is detected, but it's direction is not changed.
Uhm, the ball is supposed to be solid steel (hence the shiny look of the ball), doesn't quite make sense why it would deform visually (in reality, it does deform and return back to normal state, but it's not a visible deformation, because steel is a hard solid material). So even if the collision would be detected, it wouldn't cause the ball change its shape due to deformation. It might be likely the ball was partially hidden behind the paddle (or was supposed to be partially hidden behind the paddle) so the game changed the shape.
@@CZghost Agreed on all counts. It could just be a creative liberty, or a way to prevent the ball from overlapping the paddle layer in a early build. In videogames and movies, reality isn't always what is most entertaining.
According to Wikipedia, there were legal issues first and foremost. A Microsoft employee working at Microsoft Garage got it working on Windows 10, but was told he couldn't release it or the source code unless they were bundled with a new operating system release, so it would have to wait until Windows 11 (this was on 2019)
The thing you need to know about Floating Point mathematics is, it works exactly like resistor colour codes. You have some bits that work like the digit bands and some bits that work like the multiplier bands; and a number is encoded as a stream of known digits within a much bigger space. Adding very small numbers to very large numbers may have no effect if they don't have any bits in common.
Almost like adding 1 to infinity.
0:10 Oh, do I remember that sound. I remember a day in my senior year of high school, in an AP class, when the teacher was nice enough to give us in-class time to work on a lengthy research paper on the school laptops. One of my classmates did not realize that his volume was on full-blast. The teacher was sitting next to me, reviewing my rough draft, when all of the sudden we all heard that obnoxiously loud Pinball start-up sound. Oh man that teacher was pissed off. It was the funniest thing ever.
Sneaking down to the garage to play on the family computer when you should have been in bed...
...bbrrRRRRRWWUUUUUUUU
"When I was just a young boy, I played the Windows ball
From 9-5 up to XP, I must have played them all" :)
That deaf, dumb and blind kid can sure play a mean pinball
A wizard, perhaps
"He's an install wizard,
There has to be a twist
All windows' OS'
should be on a disk..."
I remember having an early x64 machine, and noticing that Pinball was getting...janky. Mostly with the graphical glitches, but I seem to remember some audio bugs as well. Adding in it's inability to scale up to hi-res monitors, and it was just getting bad. It doesn't really surprise me that M$ axed it, rather than fix or update it. They have a long history of letting things die on the vine, rather than put in the extra effort.
Die and not even releasing the source!
Dude, you actually debugged, on ASM level, a 20 yrs old game, designed for an dead OS, running on a dead CPU architecture. You are legendary
Definitely. The game certainly harbors tons of nostalgia; it's unclear (at the time) departure only amplified renewed interest. I was quite impressed by such a clean, facile demonstration over what is overwhelming for enthusiasts all the way up to software engineers.
Your hard work, sweaty palms, bloodstained clothes and teary eyes are incredibly appreciated my dude! This was one hell of an entertaining watch for me, and this must be some kind of special nerd power of mine or something, but I'd never imagined I could spend 30 minutes glued to a screen while some random internet bro is talking about Pinball Space Cadet for all of the different versions of Windows XP (AMD64, 32-bit, IN64, etc.) 😁👍 Thanks for making this, this was a truly great watch! And I super mega incredibly enjoyed doing so 🤓🤓
man, what a nostalgia blast seeing this in my recommended. I used to play this TO DEATH and tbh it was probably the first "video game" I ever played.
24:24 That's not even a real aero theme. The installer window is made up of static images, including the transparency of the window borders if I remember correctly. Windows PE itself doesn't have any components related to complex window theming, nor does it contain anything related to window transparency, if I remember correctly. dwm.exe is responsible for window effects and is missing in PE. You can confirm this by pressing Shift+F10, and running taskmgr from the resulting command prompt and snooping around on the X:\ ramdisk that it's running from.
I actually didn't know this, but in hindsight, it makes perfect sense. I guess the real story is that Aero on itanium would have been pretty bad :)
At least on my zx6000 (although I'm told the iLO VGA which is much more standardized, is even worse in terms of performance)
I want to say Panther was the codename for Windows PE as a whole. I may dig into it, but I more called that out on how bad Aero looked in that color mode. Most IA64 servers, if they had VGA at all, had iLO VGA which was not exactly impressive.
Echoing/agreeing with everything here, you can't move the setup dialog window. The close button also looks... off. Always has. I kinda find it cynically amusing nobody ever fixed it. ("Oh it'll only be seen at setup time," they probably said... while the OS X installer was playing music from across the room...)
@@asmqb7222 It's a stripped down copy of windows, running a full screen app. Why would you want to drag the window anywhere...
@@lillywho Indeed so, and the whole package does the job it needs to do.
But since my brain OCDs about details, I do eyetwitch a bit that 9x, 2K and XP all had draggable windows, while Vista didn't.
But this reflection also sort of tells me that the revamp process was so disorganized, ad-hoc and scrambled that they had to resort to this sort of thing in order to "get setup done" and move onto the next thing.
Which only gives me more respect for the RelEng gold-master process, I guess.
Perfect timing, Dave's Garage just released a video about why it was removed and how to run it on modern Windows.
and this is the reason we're dropping in a few hours vs Monday which was the original plan.
I copied the game on a 500 Mb USB stick when i was 5 and now I can play it on Windows 10 lol
Knowing that it was no longer available on Windows Vista onwards, I made a backup of space cadet when we got rid of our old XP laptop, which I now have mirrored across various drives and online backup services. It works on Windows 10, too, just without sound effects. Interestingly enough, I also have a game I bought from Maxis that came with the full version of Full Tilt pinball (both Space Cadet and some other dragon-themed one). It runs at a much higher resolution than the version XP shipped with. I think part of the appeal of Space Cadet Pinball as an adult is how shrouded in mystery it is; everyone with XP had it and played it, but it was created by a defunct company bought out by Maxis (another defunct company bought out by EA...) and it just mysteriously vanished with Windows Vista. Thanks for doing a deep-dive!
My first experience with this game was when I was a young child. Young enough to not understand that pinball was more than just keeping the ball up, hitting stuff, and blinking lights. Once I found out there was actually missions, promotions and more, my mind was blown and I was hooked.
Any ASM is hard to read if you are not used to it. I, for once, always preferred to debug problems on Itanium, even if they also reproe on other architectures. For starters, the stacked registers (RSE) almost always gave you full access to any variable no mater how many stack frames deep there were at. RSE also makes function calling easier to read, given you always have registers separated into in, local and out registers. Sure, there were some eye-sore parts to it, like the idiotic VLIW bundles which did nothing but liter the code with unneeded NOPs. NATs also made the code far more verbose than needed. But this, again, you get used to filter.
Back to the "ease to read" argument, I feel x87 code impenetrable, but lots of folks are completely fine with it. Another example (equally subjective) is that I am very comfortable with A64 (Aarch46) code but I find T32 (Aarch32 Thumb-2) hard to read. It all has to do with how used you are to it.
I remember playing pinball on my grandfather's XP
I remember that I could change the size of the window. And I'm fairly certain that I could play in full screen. However it didn't like changing window size when playing. Only after just starting the game.
If I went afk mid game and returned an hour later or so, it had real problems changing window size and might crash.
I'm not the only one who remembered that XP had this file. Amazing work!
Fun fact: Space Cadet shipping with localized versions of Windows (I can at least confirm for the German version) use a different font for the texts in the two lower boxes on the right. Presumably the original font did not include accented characters and it was easier to completely swap the font instead of adding them.
I play this now on my PC with Xbox controller
Ok, that deserves a subscribe. I've worked with developers that wouldn't make that much effort to get their own buggy production code working properly. . . and your theory is plausible and consistent with other choices made for Vista.
The floating point numbers bit with Minecraft caught my attention, now I'm not sure if it still does this but what you described with the collision detection of the crafting table sounds a lot like the early versions of Minecraft Bedrock Edition, if you go out to a certain amount of blocks everything is off center, you clip through the floor if you go even farther. The far lands there are a lot weirder, mostly consisting of rows of blocks that can't be broken.
Most important reason is that it didn't match Vista's Aero UI with the other games developed by Oberon Media.
And that game just seemed outdated. Who even bothers shipping an ancient game from 1995 to a more polished OS that doesn't match the OS's UI?
I spent endless hours playing this as a kid. The sounds are bringing me right back.
I didnt see, but I heard someone playing this and instantly remembered this game, even though I haven’t played it since I was a kid 20 years ago.
Back when WinXP was the concurrent OS, I had a UI customizer program, and it was filled with wallpapers and themes about "Longhorn", which I had no idea what it was at the time. I just thought it was an inside joke or the group behind that program, and didn't give it much more thought. Well, now I know what that was about... thank you for your incredible efforts, sir!
We need an solo vídeo about Intel Itanium.
It's on the list, but my power bill needs a rest first :)
I just hope it is a decently researched video then - cause there is a lot of misinformation, like claiming the architecture or the products were bad and didn't perform well.
(Heck, there is a reason why it was supported for so long despite not being good with the large x86 codebase).
The company i worked for back them bought 10 of thousands of them... I guess they was one major custermer
Well, Merced (IA64v1) was rubbish. It's dreadfully slow due to far too little L2/L3 cache, and honestly, McKinley was being outpaced by the Pentium 3/4s of the era. IA64 was mostly supported because HP chose that hill to die on, but by 2004, it was pretty clear that it was a dead end in processor evolution.
I liked that it had a very basic High score manipulation protection scheme. When I was young it helped me understand programming a lot on how small actions can be good deterrence for the people not dedicated to figure out how something works.
I used to play this all the time on the computer. I even have this on a CD backup disc, so I can play anytime. I got insanely good at this. It was one of the most addicting games you could play, without having a CD installed on your computer, or having an internet connection. I downloaded the 64 portable version of this game. In fact, I have a sundry that is full of the old windows games on a single thumb drive. I even got all the Diablo games, Starcraft, civilization, and so on. It was easy Once I figure it out which part of the codeine you needed in order to put it on a flash drive and play it without the disc. I even have a few modded versions of these games as well. I believe the reason why modern window versions don't have pinball, is because they lost their license, and it was intended as a demo. There's a full version of the game, but it's not space cadet. They have a skin you can choose to use that makes it look like space cadet, but it's not space cadet. That's why I have a portable version of the game I can insert on any computer end as long as the components are compatible, the game won't crash or glitch.
I think Raymond makes it clear in his post that it was not a licensing issue, and the fact that several builds exist would indicate so too
MJD led me here, I was just slightly curious initially. I certainly didn't think i would sit through the entire video and be that entertained, it felt like watching a murder documentary (well, technically Pinball was more or less murdered :D) but with content that actually interests me. You got yourself a subscriber.
Great video, I believe that it was decided to be removed when Microsoft decided to go the windows as a service route and they didn't have the rights to sell it as an addon for the MS store since it was a third party developed app. I would definitely buy this classic if it ever gets ported to Pinball FX.
This, Klondike, and Spider Solitaire were my favourite games on there. I remember sinking so many hours when using the PCs at school years before I finally got my first laptop.
Purble Place?
In the end it was the logical explanation that won out. It simply did not age as well as minesweeper and solitaire.
Yet, coming home from school in the late 90s, I was 1000% more excited to play Pinball than Minesweeper.
So your ‘logic’ comes from…what? Lmao gtfo
@@namedrop721 It was mentioned at the end I believe. The new vista desktop "Aro" theme (since this really happened during longhorn to vista transition) did not play nice with the older image resolution the game would have looked very bad if they updated it to fit the modern OS. That challenge also coupled with image licensing (maybe some other licensing aspects unaware to the general public) made it very much impossible for them to put it in the new releases due to terrible UI.
Minesweeper, MS solitaire was licensed by Microsoft so thats easy for them to change the graphics to the new look. You can see it in the end of the video as well.
@Zaydan Naufal yeah must have left e that out. thanks for the correction! :D
Not only was this a fascinating deep dive, but to manage to get the original authors to chime in on a thread to add more background context was icing. Excellent video, and one well-earned subscribe! :)
Amazing video and i love how the original devs have also commented on this video, used to play this game a lot on my dad's work computer whenever he took us with him to his workplace, and now seeing all the engineering and all the skill that went to pioneer windows and PCs into what it is nowadays and also people like you who are such experts and educated on the subject of retro computing and older software is something really magical to me, thanks a lot for making this great video!
This was incredible information, amazingly put together and presented on the highest level. Thank you!!
That's a month of my life that seems to be well rewarded.
So many good memories of playing this back in the days ^^
this is the first game I ever played in my life. I thought this game was a fever dream!
I read that they got rid of space Cadet pinball because the license for it expired so they didn’t wanna have to pay the company to keep it in modern versions of windows
While having a proper native 64-bit/amd64/x86_64 version would be nice, I've long found that the 32-bit version copied from XP works just fine on 64-bit Win 7, 8.x, and 10, and probably Vista.
I thought this was just going to be a video showing that 64-bit Pinball exists BUT DAMN was it something else. What a legend.
The original title of this video was "The REAL Story on Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (ft. Windows on Itanium)", but Dave's Garage (which is a 151k sub channel) dropped a video on Pinball, and I rushed this one out the door to prevent being overshadowed, and made it clear that ther was more to this.
I have not heard of Itanium before; if you can do more videos on that, that would be interesting. Great video though I never saw the appeal of pinball games.
The appeal was (I suppose) experienced by a generation of people who grew up visiting bowling alleys or bars that featured actual physical pinball machines.
As one of those people, I can tell you that I found the computer versions wanting when compared to the real thing.
I applaud this mans dedication to the game I played when the phone was in use. I sure miss you Space Cadet, also the weird hover car game from Win 95.
Omg Hover got pretty rage-inducing but I was obsessed with it lol
I love hover. Did u have digdug centipede and battlezone too. I did have Windows me as well. The cadet game was there from the beginning but most later versions Vista xp and other versions got rid of the cadet pinball and other games.
Another possible reason: someone had an employee performance metric for removing unnecessary / out of place / old features and Pinball was an easy and highly visible target.
It’s so tiny though
So they add in bloated other game stuff in Vista. Not really likely.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to spot it, but I loved
"[Itanium] provides EPIC examples of how not to design a processor" 😁
That was in fact intentional word play :)
I can’t wait to see the video on Itanium!
Just for the record, the original author, Cinematronics, gets acquired by Maxis, the division of EA, in 1997, long before the final builds of XP 64 go out. I suspect the 64-bit port of this gets locked up in both technical AND legal (doesn't work and questions around the legal ownership of code and willingness to support it). The end result is a product that is broken technically and ambiguous legally, leaving product managers with the decision to ultimately take the safe route and scrap it right before pressing final GA builds. This would explain why Raymond's article has some merit to it, but also why some builds had it and some didn't. In the end, it dies like Boba Fett -- without much fanfare or thought given to its legacy, despite its rabid fan base.
OMG, I had forgotten all about Space Cadet Pinball, despite having lost several hours playing it over the years
mad people only here, just a DX promo demo, bought to promote DX in windows!
why the mad freaks here?
Why is the background music so intense like it's a murder crime mistery.
"What if were to tell you that I had multiple 64-bit versions of Space Cadet Pinball which worked just fine?"
I think most of us would ask you for a download link.
Very interesting debrief of the whole Pinball story, I had forgotten about it. I think your supposition makes a lot more sense.
Wow, I'd completely forgotten about this game. Used to love it.
I wonder if the DEC Alpha version from NT4 for AXP sorta counts as 64-bit?
Since Alpha CPU itself is 64 bit, though NT4 essentially runs a 32-bit userspace and kernel on top of it, albeit with 64-bit registers.
AXP was a 64-bit platform, but NT ran in a 32-bit operating mode and address space. The problem was more related to the FPU as far as I can tell; I don't have an AXP system so I can't easily examine how it does floating point numbers though ...
@@NCommander If my Multia wasn't acting up again now (even after thermal paste, the heat death chip, and recapping) I'd look into this myself to see
Well got that working... now I guess I have no excuses, time to load it into visual studio or windebug
@@ChartreuseKitsune I can't remember if symbols are located on the NT4 CD, but they are on the CD versions of the Service Packs (I know I found pinball.dbg on one of them). They're not PDB based, so good luck :)
This video has brought me down to memory lane when I used to play this with my dad, great video and details on it.
I'm wondering, given the access to disassembly tools and such, if someone might be able to export the original graphics, use an open-source AI upscaling tool to make them larger, and then reassemble the game.
I think it'd be a worthy project for any game modder with reverse engineering chops :D
Fun fact - Full Tilt Pinball runs at 1024x768
Here is a portable version made from a disassembly. The assets must be somewhere embedded there. No idea where.
Got over 1m score once at my grandparents house on their desktop that was in their chilly basement, the room was more or less a storage room that had all sorts of ancient relics, some being jarred and pickled vegetables probably older than me at that time, I was probably about 7 years old. Now It's almost 20 years later both my grandparents have passed and life has been crazy. Yet the noises bring that highscore day back like it was yesterday. Thx for the nostalgia !
One of the most interesting things I never knew I wanted to know! :-D
Saying that there was a bug where the ball clipped through everything isn't necessarily saying it happened 100% of the time. Maybe part of the problem in fixing it was in recreating it reliably. I'm pretty sure it was multiple issues - the graphical corruption, ugly dithering, bugs like that one and lack of Aero, Vista's defining feature, it was likely just decided to not be worth the effort.
Given its inclusion and re-enablement in all the Longhorn builds and XP x64, I honestly suspect no one at Microsoft gave it more than a curiosity glance once the bug was fixed, so I lean much heavier on it getting axed due to Aero.
I actually played space cadet in windows 10 without any emulator. My father also used to play space cadet in windows xp
It's easy to run. I first played it on my Windows 7 a few years ago (since playing it on Windows xp originally) and made sure to put it on my 64 bit Windows 8.1/10 (currently 21H1). I have absolutely no problem running it. I knew the compatibility issue wasn't true because it plays fine on all of my post Windows xp ×64 bit computer's. I even run Microsoft Plus for Windows xp and the other Microsoft Plus program for Windows xp that includes Microsoft Dancer's on my Windows 10. When I first tried to install Microsoft Plus for xp on my Windows 10 I would get the 64 bit error and it wouldn't install because it's a 32 bit app, but it installed one day for some reason. It's been working fine every since.
I copied the game on a 500 Mb USB stick when i was 5 and now I can play it on Windows 10. It still works for some reason.
@@Hexagonian But now the flippers are not moving when I click A and Z for some reason
I am new to your channel. Watched a couple of videos... subscribed. I appreciate the efforts you go to in creating videos and the style of presentation is top drawer. Puts some of the large youtubers on similar topics to shame. I look forward to seeing your channel grow!
One thing I remember when installing old pinball game on windows 7 and windows 10 if you fullscreen the collision bug will show up but if have fullscreen off it wont happen I don't know why that happens basically try play long enough and flippers hitbox fails to detected collision between ball and flipper
Its almost 2021, where are the mods to upscaling this game to hd!
What an effort! Absolutely awesome. This is REAL enthusiasm. You must have an unlimited amount of time. Question: Is removing pinball a step of Microsoft's strategy to make Windows more crappy?
probably... just join the #linuxmasterrace
Such a great game. It's sad its done.
I loved this game, in fact, though I was playing offline, no access to inet, I managed to beat the high score on the board by an astronomical chance. I can't quite remember how many digits it was as it was years ago and on my old laptop that bit the dust after a couple of years. I had this crazy logic in gaining multiple balls but increase the amount I could gain if I lost a single one so i could continually play without losing my number of chances. Accurately calculating every bumper hit and ball speed.
Now, this happened to me on a IRL pinball table too and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, I racked up a large multiple digit score. Little did I know that I was playing the same game sharing the same table with another person who was eating in the same restaurant. We ended up slowly taking turns out of unknown coincidence, it wasn't until I came to leave, the guy came up and bumped me off saying that this "was his game." I walked away shocked and in disbelief.
So rude. He could have said, "hey, thanks for keeping the game going, you're great at pinball, lets take turns till one of us has to leave. It has become our game." Like how did I know that he was playing the game before i arrived cause he wasn't at the machine itself when i was playing it. Sheesh. I was only a kid back then and the guy looked like they were in their early 20's.
22:18 Ball glitches out of existence for a split second.
This is the story the elites don't want you to know about...